


dormant

by phollie



Category: Pandora Hearts
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-04
Updated: 2015-01-04
Packaged: 2018-03-05 08:24:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3112844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phollie/pseuds/phollie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The late afternoon sunlight slants through the shop window and casts bright shapes upon Oz’s shy, smiling face. Echo immediately knows why Gilbert is so fond of him, but her fondness is also her own, and much quieter; it’s tucked away in her chest, in this body that’s neither immaterial nor entirely real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dormant

+

**dormant**

+

                    The shop is dusty but, Echo thinks, sweet in a way, laden with memories that she can nearly feel in little clouds on the air. There’s a hopefulness hanging about the place, nostalgic like a daydream – it suits Oz more than it suits her, but still, she’s glad he brought her with him, even if she feels as though she’s taking up far too much space beside him.

                    “I’ve never been in here before,” Oz says lightly, his eyes bright and curious as he looks around. “I always thought it looked so pretty from the outside, but I never got to actually see for myself.” Gentle fingertips rise to brush over the spine of some old book with a golden spine. “It’s nice, I mean. Finally being able to stop in for a look.”

                    Echo finds her voice lingering unsteadily in the nervous space before her. “Is it…as you imagined it to be?”

                    Oz gives a soft laugh that reminds Echo of a bell. “Nothing is ever really how I imagine it,” he says with a smile. “Which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just…I’m always making up these fancy places in my head, like the ones in storybooks. I’ve done it since I was a kid.”

                    Echo toys with the flowing edge of her sleeve. Her hands feel skittish and uncertain as to where to set themselves. “Fancy places?”

                    “Mhm. When I see some little shop from the outside, I get to thinking about how it could be like one of those magical settings like in Holy Knight. Even just simple bookstores on the street could look like enchanted caves in my head.” Oz smiles again, the curve of it half-hidden behind the rich green wool of his scarf. The color of it matches his eyes; Echo thinks that’s wonderful, but the sentiment of it is buried down deep in some unexplored cavern of her mind that she dares not trek.

                    “It’s probably a little silly of me,” Oz says with another laugh. “You’d think I would have grown out of it by now.”

                    “It’s not silly,” Echo says with a quickness that surprises her. She’d scarcely planned the words in her mind, let alone expected them to build up into sound. She tucks her bottom lip beneath her teeth to keep from speaking again, but now Oz is smiling at her with his eyes and that makes everything so much more difficult.  

                    “Thank you,” Oz laughs out, his voice soft and grateful. “If you say it, then it really must be true.”

                    The late afternoon sunlight slants through the shop window and casts bright shapes upon his shy, smiling face. Echo immediately knows why Gilbert is so fond of him, but her fondness is also her own, and much quieter; it’s tucked away in her chest, in this body that’s neither immaterial nor entirely real. It simply is, this body, and this small feeling that inhabits the gilded cage of her ribs seems more tangible than any bone or muscle that shapes the form of _Noise_ , or that of _Echo._

                    “But just this is enough,” Oz says, his eyes drifting tranquilly from shelf to shelf, panning over the wares of colorful glass bottles and silver hair combs and tiny porcelain animals. “Not every place has to be some enchanted cave to be meaningful, does it?”

                    Echo looks down at her boots, mulling that over. A proper answer doesn’t come to her, only a tiny confession that ghosts past her lips before she has time to leash it back. “I just like…being out. With someone different.”

                    She doesn’t see Oz smiling, but she can feel it, the warmth of it emanating outwards onto the air like its own living, breathing thing. “Someone other than Vincent, I take it?”

                    Echo’s mouth screws up into a small scowl. Her reply is a hum, eyes averted to a shelf adorned with little crystal rabbits. One of them is crafted from a dark, smoky quartz, imitating black fur. It sits at the very front of the row of animals, barely an inch tall, and is pointed directly at Oz as if watching him.

                    Oz kneels down before the case to look inside. Echo tries not to notice how something in his eyes is touched with a spark of faint confusion, some half-formed skeleton of recognition that lacks a substantial body to support it. The look is disconcerting; it doesn’t fit him. He counters it with a smile and a breath of a laugh that Echo can pinpoint as forced right away, still earnest but false and fabricated. “Usually these sorts of things make me think of Alice,” he says. “I’m not sure why this one feels different.”

                    Echo looks from Oz’s bright, tired face to the black rabbit on the shelf. The sunlight passes through its dark crystal body, golden and alive. When she looks back to Oz, there’s something in his eyes that she wishes wasn’t there, some faraway fracturing that has no name. She doesn’t like it when he looks scared; it feels like something vital in the universe is out of order when Oz Vessalius is anything but beaming.

                    The quiet moment is broken when Oz straightens up again and laughs a hollow, breathless laugh. “Well, that was strange,” he says, chipper and cheerful and empty. “Maybe we should get going? Unless you wanted to wander around in here a bit more.”

                    There’s a sinking somewhere in Echo’s chest that she can’t pinpoint with a fingertip, can only feel in some omnipotent, wordless dread that she tries to swallow down but can’t. (It’s the same feeling that rises up in a dark cloud whenever Noise appears, laughing, hissing, demanding their body back and taking it for some violent, bloody spin–)

                    Echo pushes the thought away and gives Oz a small nod, tucking her hands within her hanging sleeves to hide their shaking. Oz offers her another smile, almost apologetic, before he hides his mouth behind his scarf once more and turns on his heel to lead the way out of the shop. Echo watches his shoulders as he walks, thinking about warmth, until something steals her attention and pulls her gaze away.

                    A row of porcelain dolls line the topmost shelf of the wall. They watch her with unblinking glass eyes, knowing everything.

                    She walks a little faster then, turning her eyes quickly down to the floor as she shuffles along. In the midst of her distraction, she bumps into Oz’s back, her forehead touching the space between his shoulder-blades. Oz half-turns to look at her, mouth still hidden behind dark green wool. Echo sees his eyes flit up to where she’d been looking, up at the dolls that soundlessly laugh at them both; without realizing, Echo hides her face away from him, as if by looking at the dolls, he’s looking into her as well, some secondhand, wondering stare that she’ll crumble beneath.

                    Oz stays rooted to the spot, hand on the door – and then, time chugs back into movement as he leads her out of the shop and into the crisp, silver winter sunlight. He laughs at nothing when the warmth of the sun touches his face. Echo wonders how he can still breathe at all.

                    The two of them walk three paces faster than before, huddling close to each other’s borrowed bodies, but neither of them say a word as to why.


End file.
